Week twelve, you guys. The season is basically over, and we’ve already arrived at the end of June. How could this possibly happen? I feel like I was still settling on what to watch this season just a couple weeks ago, and now we’re saying goodbye to Hinamatsuri as Joe preps for his very last match. The uncharitable reality might just be that this season was never able to establish much of an identity for me; neither My Hero Academia nor Legend of the Galactic Heroes are shows I’d considered tethered to this particular moment, while Megalo Box will likely end up a low entry on my end-of-year list and Hinamatsuri will shuffle off into fun but kinda trifling seasonal memory. But while the season as a whole might not be much to speak of, this particular week in anime was strong all around, demonstrating there are damn good reasons I’ve kept up with this particular catalog. Any week that adopts one of my favorite scenes from My Hero Academia can’t be that bad, and this week’s episode did everything it could to do that sequence justice. Let’s start right off with that then, and run this week down!
I was beyond thrilled to see this week’s My Hero Academia extended just as much care and attention to the All Might-Deku’s mom confrontation as it did to last week’s more conventionally superheroic battle, turning one of my favorite sequences in the manga into another highlight of the adaptation. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the show treat these less action-centric beats as built-in cooldown time, but from the vividly engaged direction to the strong animation and slightly off-balancing sound design, All Might and Mom’s argument was given all the attention and beauty it deserved.
It certainly helped that the base material here was so strong – both Midoriya and Bakugo’s moms here presented visions for their sons that felt far more grounded and specific than My Hero Academia’s dialogue often tends to, with Midoriya’s mom in particular offering a genuinely convincing argument for Midoriya leaving school. She’s never presented as anything close to an antagonist here – she’s had to suffer so much for All Might’s presence in Midoriya’s life, and her concerns are entirely based in love for her son. That this sequence could present All Might and Deku’s mom as equally sympathetic, and actually sell his mom’s ultimate acquiescence as an earned conclusion, is a credit to My Hero Academia’s consistently impressive writing. That the adaptation understood this clash is just as important as the All For One battle, and managed to bless it with every bit as much impact through far subtler tricks of execution, is a credit to this show’s very talented team. Thanks for loving this scene as much as I do, guys.
Megalo Box plodded through its final match setup episode this week, which was about par for Megalo Box’s setup episodes – not thrilling or beautiful or emotionally compelling in its own right, but still a relatively functional segue between one punchfest and the next punchfest. Probably my favorite thing about this episode was that it managed to tie both Aragaki and Yukiko’s brother back into the narrative in a way that felt both natural and like an emotional payoff for each of them, rewarding our investment in their characters while also granting the show overall a tighter sense of structure and payoff. On the other hand, Yukiko is such a vaguely defined person with such nebulous motives that a great deal of this episode’s emotional drama felt more like a narrative obligation than an emotionally charged arc.
Megalo Box obviously isn’t interested in the nitty-gritty mechanics of Shirato as an enterprise, meaning any conflict between Yukiko’s personal and private obligations doesn’t really land with much impact, and even the show’s personal drama can be reduced to “Joe and Yuri want to fight each other super bad.” Megalo Box often presents the trappings of drama with no real emotional core, hoping its distinctive aesthetics and generally professional narrative structure will carry it through. They do, but the show certainly isn’t better for it.
Hinamatsuri concluded in extremely Hinamatsuri fashion, following up a show that has delighted in anticlimax and thwarted expectations by offering a finale that was half standard Hinamatsuri, and half the epilogue to a season we didn’t actually watch. While this episode’s winter adventure was a fine segment in its own right, and used Hina’s personality to excellent comic effect, moving from that random adventure to roll credits felt incredibly abrupt. Adaptations of ongoing comedy manga often have to contort themselves to offer some kind of conclusive-feeling finale, but the alternative to that is what we saw here: the show offers one more standard bit and then abruptly drops a THE END sign in front of this.
I’d have grumbled about the unsatisfying nature of that ending, but jumping from there to another installment in Mao’s Daily Life was such a classically Hinamatsuri bit of what-the-fuckery that I felt it made the whole episode’s into one giant and largely effective meta joke. I don’t know if Mao’s finale was supposed to be an intentional sequel hook or just one more thumbing of the nose at convention, but I enjoyed it and I enjoyed this show. Hinamatsuri certainly isn’t the best warm sitcom around, but it was a strong one on the whole and a clear confirmation of Kei Okawa and his team’s talents. Now we just need that Oregairu finale film…
Legend of the Galactic Heroes also moved towards an extremely LoGH conclusion this week, capping off its season of grand space drama with an epic… total, pointless massacre. The scouring of the Alliance’s fleets was portrayed with devastating acuity in this episode, as many of the Alliance’s best men sacrificed themselves to ensure at least some portion of their subordinates were able to escape. As with many episodes, the sheer inevitability and hopelessness of all of this felt simultaneously a little overwhelming and also weirdly life-affirming – an acknowledgment that yes, most wars are this senseless, most political leaders choose war with roughly this much consideration. Hell, most of the politicians and pundits who advocated for my own country’s pointless, disastrous Iraq war still possess positions of great power and influence, and butchers like Charles Krauthammer are able to die with laurels and praise, not in the shameful disgrace they deserve. Sequences like Yang’s ground-level fighter pilots snapping at their engineering crews, only to be informed those engineers haven’t been able to sleep or eat for days, really grounded in how from the bridge leaders to the common soldiers, none of this madness was the fault of the men in the field. This episode was thrilling and crushing and positively glowing with anger, and demonstrated this terrific show at its absolute best.
